miércoles, 25 de abril de 2012

On April 2,
the @PRNews Twitter account reached a milestone of 40,000 followers. Exactly
one year prior, the account had 4,400 followers.

While brand managers shouldn't view Twitter success as a numbers game or
popularity contest, building a larger following can help amplify your strategic
efforts—from customer service and fundraising to building awareness for your
brand. And, of course, it's just plain exciting to watch a community grow.

Here are some of our lessons learned in building the PR News Twitter
community.

Don't be a droid:
Show that you've got a human side, and that your account is not just an
automated RSS feed. Pose questions, use varied punctuation and provide a
tone and voice for your account—even if it's managed by multiple people.
Give your audience—and your prospective audience—a reason to follow you on
Twitter.

Respond when people talk to you: When you receive an @ message or a direct
message—with the exception of automated direct messages—respond. Simply
say thank you, start a conversation and express gratitude when a
connection is made. If you're worried about filling up the feed with these
personal tweets and crowding the content-driven or business-goal tweets
that you feel the rest of your followers would prefer, you can schedule
them for off-peak times. Even then, the recipient will be notified you've
responded and will be more likely to engage with you again. Speaking of scheduling
tweets...

Schedule tweets for early mornings and later
hours: The social Web is a
24/7 content-consumption beast that should be fed even after you've left
the office for the day.

Give credit: With @PRNews we're
fortunate to have a lot of stories of our own to link to, but if you don't
have that option, showcasing others' work is a great way to build
connections. Linking to a blog post, article, idea or any other type of
content through another person on Twitter is a great way to show your
audience you're a must-follow in your industry, and that you're not
operating in your own company's silo.

Participate in conversations at industry
events: Be sure to know the
hashtag of the event you're attending, and keep the tweets flowing around
it before, during and after with summaries. Use direct quotes, @mentions
of speakers and retweets of fellow attendees to let everyone on site know
that you're worth following.

Integrate paid and earned: Depending on your budget, placing ads on
Twitter to promote either individual tweets or your account itself can provide
high visibility for a relatively low cost. Dallas Lawrence, chief
global digital strategist for Burson-Marsteller, says Twitter's
sponsored campaigns are one of the best crisis management resources, and a
way to gain more relevant followers. “Twitter’s targeted follower
acquisition strategy is an effective way to go from 1,000 to 10,000
followers and can help amplify your messages,” says Lawrence.

Bookmark and use the PR News Twitter
Directory. This Twitter
handle directory of PR
agencies/consultants, corporations, nonprofit organizations, PR
professionals and media, is sortable by category and can help you find a
handle within the industry in a pinch. You can also find leading individuals
and companies to follow, as well as Twitter chats to participate in to
make more connections.

Make the tweets useful. We link to useful content—both content
that we create and content created by others. But not everyone has time to
link through a tweet, so try to make the tweet itself valuable to your
community.

lunes, 16 de abril de 2012

How to be an
outstanding communicator

byMARTIN SHOVEL

The message from recruitment agencies, employer surveys and the like is
familiar, loud and clear: you must be an outstanding communicator if you want
to get to the top of your profession. Technical audit skills and practical
experience are, of course, essential, but they will only take you so far up the
greasy pole; to make it those extra few slippery feet to the very top you’re
going to have to find a way of transforming yourself from a good communicator
into an outstanding one.

Keep it simple

Outstanding communicators distinguish themselves by the way they use
language. The first thing that strikes you when you listen to an outstanding
communicator speak is the simplicity of their language: they use words you can
understand in a way that makes it easy to follow what they’re saying.

But simple is hard, and takes courage. It takes courage because it goes
against the grain of workplace communications. In organisations, language is
often used as a protective veil whose main purpose is to cover the speaker’s
back rather than enlighten their audience. A concoction of jargonistic words
arranged into convoluted sentences is an effective way of covering up ideas
that are half-baked, obvious, or trivial.

Many people mistakenly equate this kind of overcomplicated,
difficult-to-follow language with cleverness. The following example – though
satirical – makes the point:

“Undue multiplicity of personnel
assigned either concurrently or consecutively to a single function involves
deterioration of quality in the resultant product as compared with the product
of the labor of an exact sufficiency of personnel.”Masterson,
J. and Brooks Phillips, W., Federal Prose, 1948, Chapel Hill, University of North
Carolina

What effect does language like this have? It intimidates, it excludes,
it frustrates, and, ultimately, it wastes time (and therefore money!). It
embodies everything that is the antithesis of outstanding communication. It is
puffed up, self-serving – and, in the final analysis, like the emperor’s new
clothes it leaves its author looking naked and foolish. Translated into the
language of clarity and simplicity, the same gobbledygook becomes:

“Too many cooks spoil the broth.”

Beyond plain English

Clear, plain English is an essential part of good communication. It is
the language of instructions that are easy to follow, intelligible contracts,
and business letters that read as if they’ve been written by an articulate and
sympathetic human, not a machine. But outstanding communicators, although
masters of plain English, come into their own when they move beyond it.

Clear explanation is the forte of the good communicator. But clear
explanation alone isn’t going to be enough to persuade people to vote for you,
or to inspire them to follow you into the heat of battle. You need something
more: you need to be able to communicate in a way that appeals not just to
minds, but to hearts as well. When Barack Obama began his bid for the US presidency
in 2007 he was a rank outsider, an unknown. It was the power of his oratory
that opened the doors of the White House to him. Writing back in 2008, The New
Yorker’s George Packer wrote that, moments after listening to Obama’s New Hampshire campaign
speech, “the speech dissolved into pure feeling, which stayed with me for
days.”

Warming up your language

Modern neuroscience has demonstrated conclusively that we feel our way
into decisions. Numerous case studies have shown that people with damage to the
parts of their brain responsible for emotional reactions are unable to make
decisions at all. It seems that the rational mind working by itself dithers
endlessly as it weighs up the various possible reasons for taking one course of
action rather than another.

So, to be an outstanding communicator you have to begin by engaging
people’s feelings. Once people care about what you’re saying, you have their
attention. And the key to making people care is your choice of words. Words are
the wrapping for your communications, and if you want your audience to unwrap
what you say, you need to warm up your language.

The notion that words can be warm or cold might sound strange, but let’s
test it out by returning to the piece of gobbledygook I quoted earlier. Like a
lot of organisational speak, it’s crammed full of long words of Latin origin:
words like ‘multiplicity’, ‘personnel’, ‘assigned’, ‘concurrently’ and so on –
I‘m sure you get the drift.

Imagine for a moment that you’re at a friend’s party and you find
yourself chatting with someone you’ve never met before, over a glass of wine.
How would you feel if your new acquaintance (another Latinate word) spoke to
you using long Latinate words. I suspect that, like most other people, you’d
experience him as distant, cold and, given the context, weird.

But what makes ‘friend’ a warmer word than ‘acquaintance’, and ‘many’ a
warmer word than ‘multiplicity’? Well, here’s a clue: say the word
‘acquaintance’ to a young child and they’ll give you a blank look. But follow
it with the word ‘friend’ and their eyes will light up as the word conjures up
an image of someone they love.

Words like ‘friend’, ‘cook’, and ‘dog’ are common everyday words; and,
like most common everyday words, their origins lie in Old, and Middle, English.
These also happen to be the first words we learn as children – they mark our
entry into the realm of language, and verbal communication. Our relationship to
them is a visual one, because our first encounter with them is one of pointing,
touching or physically interacting with the thing they represent. They embody
that magical moment when things become words.

Visual language

By contrast, words of Latinate origin are latecomers to the English
language party – both historically, and in the language acquisition of an
individual. This explains why a word like ‘dog’ brings to mind an image, while
a word like ‘canine’ probably doesn’t. Outstanding communicators favour words
of English origin because they are warm and visual – they help other people
‘see’ what you mean.

A quotation ascribed to Winston Churchill offers a good rule of thumb
for choosing warm, visual words: “broadly speaking, the short words are the
best, and the old words best of all.” It’s no accident that the final lines
from one of Churchill’s most famous and stirring speeches (“we shall fight on
the beaches”) is full of “old words” – “beaches”, “landing grounds”, “fields”,
“streets” and “hills”.

The multisensory power of
concrete language

Latinate words are cold and abstract; Old English words are warm and
concrete. Concrete words aren’t just visual, they are multisensory – they
engage all our senses. When Churchill used words like “beaches” and “fields”,
he knew that they would invoke a variety of sensory responses in his audience:
the sight of the sand and the azure blue sky; the sound of the waves lapping on
the seashore and the shriek of the gulls; the smell of the sea; the salty taste
on their tongue; and the feeling of warm grains of sand on the soles their
feet.

Advertisers constantly exploit the power of multisensory concrete
language. They don’t try to sell us just any old generic chicken. No, it’s not
just chicken: they tell us it’s actually farm-reared, organic, golden Wiltshire
farm chicken. Carefully selected picture words like these are designed to give
us an experience – one that appeals to our tastebuds and stomachs, as well as
our intellects.

Outstanding communicators don’t tell, they show. Statistics are
abstractions that leave us cold. If you want to bring home the full horror of a
natural disaster, you don’t talk about the thousands of people who have
perished, and the unimaginable scale of the humanitarian disaster visited upon
those who’ve survived. Instead, you put the disaster into a human context by
making it concrete, and you do this by focusing on the story of a single family.

Story and metaphor

Study after study shows that people are very poor at understanding risk.
And disasters like the financial meltdown and the BP oil spill raise the
question of just how effective risk experts are at communicating what they know
about risk to non-specialists. Outstanding communicators understand the limits
of statistical data – they know that in most instances it just goes over the
heads of a lay audience.

The most effective way of communicating risk is to get people to feel
it, and the way to do this is to use story and metaphor to create an
imaginative experience of what the risk is like – one that make sense in terms
of what people already understand. To most lay people, a statistic like: 50
million acres of rainforest are cut down every year, doesn’t mean too much. It
doesn’t sound good, but it’s far too abstract for a non-specialist to grasp.

Most people don’t know what an acre looks like, and they certainly have
no experience of quantities as large as 50 million. On hearing a statistic like
this neither their brains nor their emotions are engaged. So the chances of
keeping their attention are slim at best. Al Gore faced the problem of
communicating this statistic in his campaign to save the rainforest, and being
an outstanding communicator he chose to dramatise the statistics by
transforming them into a story-like metaphor.

This is how he did it:

“We lose one acre of rainforest every second. Imagine a giant invader
from space with football-field sized feet, clomping across the rainforests of
the world – going boom, boom, boom every second. Would we react? Well, that’s
essentially what’s going in the rainforests right now!”

Putting it all together

Gore’s transformation of a dry statistic into a story metaphor that
helps people experience as well as understand the enormity of the situation,
exemplifies all the elements that make an outstanding communicator. From the
outset, Gore doesn’t allow his expertise to act as a barrier between himself
and his audience – after all, the word “communication” originates from a Latin
word meaning “to share”.

Rather than blinding them with science, he puts himself into his
audience’s shoes and looks for a way of helping them understand what they don’t
know (the statistic) in terms of something they’re familiar with (football
fields and B movies about invaders from space). He uses familiar, short,
concrete, visual words – and he makes the simple complex without compromising
its integrity.

So the key to transforming yourself into an outstanding communicator is
to make your language as visual and concrete as possible. And the best way of
doing this is to heed Churchill’s advice and go for short, everyday words,
rather than difficult-to-understand long ones. Always think carefully about who
you’re speaking to, and never allow your expertise to shroud your message in
fog. Finally, use story and metaphor to bring what you say to life – and always
remember that outstanding communicators move hearts as well as minds.

(This article was published in
August 2010 in
the Chartered Institute of Internal Auditors’ magazine. Shortly after it
appeared, the IIA’s Keith Labbett – Head of Audit at British Waterways –
invited us to give a two hour interactive plenary session on ‘Outstanding
Communications’ to the IIA’s South West Conference, which we did on 12th May
2011. Delegates loved our session and found it both stimulating and
practical. We could do something similar for your conference, so please
get in touch if you’d like to talk things over.)

7 Ways to Better Manage Your Time as a Freelancer

As a freelancer, you've taken control of your career. You can scale your workload up and down as you see fit, but how do you effectively manage yourself without losing a step? Kevin Casey, a Null Media author, and Jerome Iveson, who founded project management site Solo, discuss how a freelancer can best manage their most valuable resource—time.

One of the great allures of the freelance life is the opportunity to gain more control over how you spend your time. But making that dream a reality while building a successful, sustainable business can prove to be a challenge.

For starters, there’s the nagging anxiety that if you’re not working you’re not making money, which is, unfortunately, largely true. There’s no such thing as paid time off in the freelance world. Working for yourself revives the old cliché that “Time is money.” Mismanaging your time can become exceedingly expensive and sidetrack an otherwise promising career. This fact becomes even more apparent when you factor in all the mundane but necessary non-paying tasks of running your business, such as invoicing, courting new clients, and paying taxes.

So what are the best ways to maximize your time as a freelancer? We asked Jerome Iveson, founder of Solo, an online project-management suite designed specifically for freelancers, to share his thoughts. He offered some straightforward advice for how to manage your most valuable commodity and to avoid common time sinks.

1. Overestimate your time. Freelance pros who don’t take steps to adequately understand how much time a project or assignment will require set themselves up for major management headaches. If you ever take on work thinking “piece of cake,” take a moment to be sure it’s not a schedule drain in disguise. “Underestimating how long something will take is a killer. Always overestimate,” Iveson says. “This is especially the case if you are attempting something new that may be just outside your comfort zone. Learning on the job is all well and good, but it will take longer.”

2. Charge what you’re worth. Bad morale—or flat-out apathy—can lead to the deadly sin of procrastination. (For more on that, see #6.) This problem can appear under various guises, one of which is low pay. “Make sure you charge what you are worth. Never undercharge,” Iveson says. “Working too hard for too little will sap morale.”

3. Learn to say “no.” It’s easy, especially when you’re just starting out as a freelancer, to say “yes” to everything. Perhaps this is because you won’t get far if your clients are unhappy. But you need to set limits, too. “Clients will sometimes be testing, wanting results quicker or cheaper. Try to stick to your guns. Be firm and fair,” Iveson says. “One needy client can impact the rest of your schedule.” Decline jobs that aren’t worth your time or energy.

4. Make a project plan. Good time-management starts with a written plan, whether you prefer the latest digital tools or old-fashioned pen and paper. “Have a plan of what you want to achieve in a certain given timeframe,” Iveson says. “It doesn’t have to be detailed or rigid; a simple to-do list will work fine.”

5. Don’t beat yourself up. No one is perfect. Even if you’re a freelancing veteran, you’re likely to make mistakes every now and again. Whether you miss a self-imposed deadline or make another misstep, don’t compound the issue by wallowing in it. “Don’t be too hard on yourself if you don’t get something done on time,” Iveson says. “Learning from your mistakes and understanding how to improve is better than punishing yourself.”

6. Don’t put things off. We know, we know—that’s easier said than done. But procrastination will waylay your profitability. Chuck those bad habits and devote your work time to, well, working. Develop an action-oriented mind-set around moving projects toward completion and making smart, efficient choices. Iveson notes that that doesn’t mean you should always be in a rush. “Make timely and informed decisions. If you aren’t sure about a decision, sleep on it, reassess, and then act.”

7. Track every minute of your time. No matter how you bill clients, you can’t become more efficient if you have only a vague sense (or no idea whatsoever) of how you spend your days. You need to quantify the time you invest in projects and clients to determine whether any given one is boosting—or killing—your bottom line. To this end, track your time in a detailed fashion by whatever means works best for you. “Religiously track your time, even if you don’t charge per hour,” Iveson says. “It’s very easy to spend time doing something you love. But, if you don’t know how much time you’ve spent, how do you know if a project is profitable? If you keep spending more time than quoted on a certain task, it may be time to adjust your quote accordingly.”

Fortunately, the online era has spawned a wealth of new tools that can help maximize your resources. The web abounds with smart tools for the modern freelancer, such as project management software, virtual assistants for those non-revenue-generating tasks, and marketplaces like Elance to help you find work.

Literally – the much misused word of the moment

It's like literally so misoverused. But whereas Jamie Redknapp gets the
word nonsensically wrong, writers such as James Joyce knew exactly what they
were doing with it

Jamie Redknapp

I
was sitting in a cafe – one of those genericpain au raisinand latte joints, with an earnest
singer-songwriter soundtrack to boot – when a kid to my left piped up: "My
school gym is like literally 500 years old." His friends nodded with
conviction. They understood. They felt the appalling deprivation of
it all. A 500-year-old cross-trainer just isn't any good to anybody. But I
wasn't going to underestimate my table-neighbour just yet. I couldn't give up
on him like that. After all, I appreciated the subtle contradiction of that
"like", poised on the edge of potential simile, and that bold,
indicative "literally", ready-armoured for its grapple with hard
fact. But then, a couple of sentences further into their criss-crossing
conversation, he said: "I'm literally gutted that I failed my English
mock." Ah, well, yes, quite. The country is literally going to the dogs.

Actually,
I rather enjoy it when people force a "literally" where the
antithetical and more pretentious "figuratively" would do – would, in
fact, be more literal. But I have my limits. If you literally spray me with
your false statements, do I not drown? If you literally press it upon me that
the impossible has indeed happened, do I not recoil? However, one needs to be
careful in diagnosing such linguistic ills. Nobody likes the queasy pedant
creeping up with cold fingers, ready to clip our wings. (He tends to sit on his
own in the corner of genericpain au raisin, skinny latte joints where
they play singer-songwriter tunes.) It is an unfashionable and unendearing
role.

But
as Anthony Burgess once said, the poet and the pedant are as one, and grammar
is glamour. So let's be poetical. Let's indulge ourselves in some glamour. It
is tiresome to merely point out the ridiculousness of a statement such as
"that cross to Rooney was literally on a plate" (Jamie Redknapp) or "Barca literally passed Arsenal to death" (Jamie
Redknapp) or "he had to cut back inside on to his left, because he
literally hasn't got a right foot" (Jamie Redknapp). It is even more
boring to then counter this with a pained attempt at sarcasm such as "did
he smash the china?", "someone should call the police" or
"wow, a uniped footballer" (Unglamorous Pedant). It is far more
interesting and glamorous to question what we are doing when we say "he
walks into the room and he's literally like a hurricane" (Chantelle
Houghton) or when, over a contemplative cuppa perhaps, we merely observe that
"centre forwards have the ability to make time stand still. And when
Chopra got the ball, it literally did just that" (Jamie Redknapp). What,
for instance, might these phrases have to say about our relationship
to reality?

I'm no socio-linguist or
cognitive-scientist, but I do like to float some hypotheses: maybe we're a
generation that is scared of commitment, linguistically deferring reality with
our false literallys and our compulsive "likes" and "sort
ofs" and "kind of things" that make everything seem only
tentative and approximate; maybe our literallys are geared for emphasis, betraying
a touching desire to be taken seriously or a cry for attention; maybe our
misuse reveals a deeper insecurity about what in fact is real; maybe it
reflects a sheer disregard for proportion or accuracy; or maybe it arises
from a subconscious need for universality in a confusing age of spiralling
subjectivities and relativistic hopscotch, longing to pin down objective truths
in even the most fantastical of scenarios …

Of
course, we might just be lazy and imprecise users oflanguage.
But what happens when James Joyce uses "literally" incorrectly, as
when he says that "Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off
her feet" or tells us that to Leopold Bloom's mind the Gloria in
Mozart's Twelfth Mass is "the acme of first class music as such,
literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat". Is James's
"literally" any better than Jamie's?

I
would suggest that a writer must have good reason for misusing the word. After
all, literally also means "to the letter" and "of
literature" (deriving from the Latin for "letter":littera),
so we should expect a degree of exactitude and particularity from a man of
letters such as Joyce. And he more than delivers, misusing his literallys to
grant us a deeper insight into the workings of his characters' minds. Just to
take the second example from above, Joyce is not only able to tell us something
about the dynamic interaction between Bloom's thirst for "higher" knowledge
and his bourgeois background, but, more intimately, he is able to embody
Bloom's capacity for empathy – Bloom can harmonise high and low, just as he can
align the literal and the figurative.

Salman
Rushdie is another serial "literaliser". He never tires of taking
phrases that sound like classic hyperbole ("I am literally
disintegrating", "he began, literally, to fade" inMidnight's Children) and making them, well, literal. In doing so he creates fantastic
otherwise worlds, where the angle of vision has been slightly adjusted so that
we might see things anew.

The
point is that these writers are actually being highly precise in their misuses.
Here is a particular favourite of mine: "The earth is literally a mirror
of thoughts. Objects themselves are embodied thoughts. Death is the dark
backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything." This is the
sublime Saul Bellow inHumboldt's Gift. The thoughts are partially ironised – they belong to the novel's
narrator, who is struggling to summarise a range of impenetrable philosophical
works – but nevertheless contain immense truth and beauty. However, it is by
working through and beyond that initial intervening "literally" that
he gets to the pure metaphor of the last sentence. And it is in that last
sentence that we hit the heights of genius.

Writers such as Bellow, Joyce and
Rushdie remind us of the fundamentally comic nature of life. That's not comic
as in "ha ha" comedy (there's little to laugh about in those Bellow
lines), but something more essential – a mood perhaps, maybe even a quality of
vision. It has to do with life's potential for adjustability and transformation;
with a reality of shifting proportions, surprising angles, creative awrynesses.
The comic world is above all an inclusive world. It is also opposite to the
tragic view of a harsh and prohibitive world, where the literal – the objective
truth – is inflexible and unassailable.

Clive James once called a sense of
humour "common sense dancing". I think that this is profound. If
it is so, then misuses of literally are common sense raving: we know that the
fans behind the goalpost haven't literally gone insane (Jamie Redknapp) and
that Messi doesn't literally send people out of the stadium (Jamie Redknapp).
The writers, however, are the ones who recognise our powerful need for the
literal and figurative. They convey our longing for some kind of sympathy between
the figurative expressions of our imaginations (clumsy and beautiful as they
are) and the empirical truth of the literal world that we seek to describe. The
writers show us that if the world is a mirror of thoughts, no straightforwardly
literal statement will ever be enough to help us see it more clearly.

Ordinary (or common) nouns that end in s, both singular and plural, show possession simply by adding an ' after the s but proper nouns (names of people, cities, countries etc.) can form the possessive either by adding the 's or simply adding the ':

b. the ladies' tennis club, the teachers' journal, the priests' church (note that the priest's church would only be refering to one priest while the priests' church refers to a group.)

General notes: Many people want to know how to form the possessive of their own name when it ends in an 's' or when refering to the whole family, e.g. The Jones' children.
Today it is no longer considered incorrect to use either form (Jones's or Jones') and many large organisations now drop the ' completely (e.g. Barclays Bank, Missing Persons Bureau) when publishing their name.